This characterization of Snowden is unfair and unhelpful and Gladwell has made errors before…

But the 10,000 hours thing he gets right — because he DOESN'T claim the stuff this article claims. Just check out http://freakonomics.com/podcast/malcolm-gladwell/ for a clear, unambiguous interview where Gladwell emphasizes that hours of practice must be *quality* practice and *still* some people have talents and potential that others lack. In other words, he doesn't at ALL believe the nonsense attributed to him here in trying to discredit him overall.

Dweezil isn't a bad name at all, and he turned out just fine. Frank always said that if his kids got shit, it would be for their last name (and associations with him, being that some aspects of his career, politically and satirically, were controversial and also "weird" by various norms)

Your post can literally be read as "Remember X from history? I don't, because I wasn't alive then. We can and should ignore all history and any lessons it offers and instead judge everything only by personal experience."

The truth is that there *were* complaints about cars and they were *correct* and cars have had hugely negative impacts on society in all sorts of disruptive ways, mostly enabling the break-down of human-centered urban planning etc

We don't live in a pure capitalist system. Everyone continually confuses capitalism and markets. Markets and competition have great value. Capitalism isn't about whether there are markets, much less free markets. The definition of capitalism is whether the basic capital, the means of production, are *privately* owned. That's it. Socially owned enterprises and public commons of all sorts are not capitalism. Every single successful anything that doesn't have private owners is not capitalism.

You can have markets and competition without private ownership of basic resources. And we can have completely dysfunctional market failure and monopolies while having everything be privately owned, i.e. capitalism.

That's totally irrelevant. Lessig is saying that if he runs, it would be on some sort of incontrovertible promise that he will take nearly zero action on anything other than achieving a rebalance of our democracy and then step down.

So, I'd guess he'd want to get Sanders to be his VP, so he could just turn things over to Sanders later, I dunno.

It's a nutty but interesting idea. Put simply: Lessig is worried that if everyone even elected Sanders somehow that people would say "they elected him for health care, for education, for civil rights…" and so it wouldn't be an absolute mandate *specifically* for overturning Citizens United…

But Sanders *has* made Citizens United a *key* focus, with his whole emphasis on refusing PAC money. I think Lessig isn't giving Sanders enough credit for really emphasizing this.

No president goes on to a regular job. No president is later someone's employee. Presidents can do speaking gigs or writing or whatever if they care to be insanely rich. Otherwise, they get some sort of pension so they are set for life anyway.

The best assumption is that Obama is actually politically supportive of this garbage, like he really believes in it. Ugh.

An entire government isn't a person. It doesn't say things. People in governments and people on behalf of various government agencies say things.

Your ideology that thinks of government as this singular thing is so far removed from reality, it's pernicious.

When people representing a public university (that's a type of government institution even) say they care about innovation or a fire dept (government!) says they cares about public safety or a parks dept says they care about recreational opportunities, it's not bullshit just because some executive in another part of government has other views.

Patent Abolition would *not* require a constitutional amendment. The constitution does *not* mandate that we have patent law, it merely *permits* congress to enact it. It's not required. So it could be abolished with a simple law.

One detail: "This is partly what copyright is designed to achieve: Control for the artist." is only true with the qualification that the control is *for the purpose* of promoting artistic development for the public benefit. Copyright by the U.S. Constitution does not serve the purpose of artistic control as an end in itself.

I understand the original issue was about GoDaddy, but there's a lack of clarity here about whether any other registrars are a problem and about which are the most ethical options etc. Well, what do you expect from a "sponsored" post that is really an ad. I certainly still appreciate the direction of rejecting bad companies and supporting EFF.

You can spout libertarian jargon all you like, but there is no such thing as "freedom to contract" that isn't totally tied to states and laws. Your mythology has little connection to reality.

Anyone who has the "freedom to contract" without any system to enforce that contract also has the freedom to break the contract.

And the premise that contracts are fair fundamentally because people agree to them is grossly naive. Rare are the contracts that have both parties coming to them with equal standing and complete knowledge of all the subtleties.

Contracts are often war-games. And they have no standing without some mechanism to enforce them which fundamentally comes from some threat of something.

The sharing between two willing parties isn't the "rights" holder and someone, it's the person who has a file on their computer who shares it with their friend or neighbor or other fellow citizen. *That* is two willing parties sharing together.

Gosh, I don't like being an aggressive asshole. I feel like being one though.

Article: propagandists make lots of lies to scare people, but Senator calls them on their bullshit

Adam: thus we need a flat tax! (oh, and throw in implication that Senator above is childish)

Can you say non sequitur? No, I need some more aggressive rejecting term for Adam's comment. It's um, so, you see, there's evil propagandists and then there's someone calling them out. Ok? Calling that a childish argument is, well, so, it's like an intentional desire to destroy normal intellectual thought.

Person A: The Sun goes down in the *east* and after that, it dries up until morning when it gets colorful again and rises out of the sea.

Person B: That's wrong in so many ways, it's total horse shit.

Adam: Lookit Person A and Person B, grown men arguing like children. This obviously calls for a flat tax!